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Students and historians of psychoanalysis are often reminded that familiarizing themselves with Freud's vast correspondence (estimated at thirty thousand letters) can be as rewarding to the understanding of his teachings as the reading of his published essays. Surely, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the declining art of letter writing makes this particular genre unfamiliar to many. Those who cherish this source of knowledge, however, will find these two volumes as good as the best any Freud reader could find.
Freud's correspondence with Max Eitingon spanned a period of thirty years. It is probably the last remaining voluminous exchange of letters with a single disciple, a member of the notorious “Secret Committee,” whose place in the annals of psychoanalysis is often misrepresented and underestimated.
Reading this correspondence we get a firsthand account of the formative years of the psychoanalytic movement: the founding of the first psychoanalytic day clinic and training institute in Berlin; the establishment of the International Training Committee; the bitter disputes over Wilhelm Reich's political leanings; the painful technical controversies with Ferenczi and Rank.
In April 1933 the possibility that Eitingon might have to leave Germany was first raised. After forty years of living in Germany, the Russian-born Eitingon emphasized his complete identification with the institute he had founded, and his determination to leave Berlin only if forced to do so. Nevertheless, Aryanization advanced rapidly; two of Eitingon's non-Jewish colleagues hurried to Vienna so that Freud might appoint them to be the legal successors to Eitingon, and on August 23, 1933, Freud wrote Ernest Jones, “Berlin is lost” (Freud and Jones 1993, p. 726).